The subject matter disclosed herein relates to multi-gang capacitive touch switch plates.
Currently, electrical wall apparatuses are being installed as individual products into a wall box and connected to their respective line voltage wires. Wall boxes are available in single, double, triple and quadruple configurations. Larger configurations are achievable but not commonly used. To provide the end assembly a finished look, a cover plate is generally applied that acts as a frame for all the installed apparatuses. The cover plate also effectively covers rough edges where sheet rock and the wall box meet.
In many instances, the Decora-style is widely used for electrical wall apparatuses. This style provides for the ability to visually integrate products in an apparatus from different manufacturers, such as a light dimmer by a first manufacturer, a light switch by a second manufacturer and a door bell product by a third manufacturer.
The use of plastic cover plates is low in cost due to the low-cost, high volume manufacturing of the plastic cover plates. The disadvantages of the cover plates, however, are that products in the frame can be installed with crooked angles, that gaps may be formed between the cover plate and the apparatus and, due to the multi-vendor situation, there may be color variations between the cover plate and the apparatuses. While technically not a problem, all the mentioned disadvantages yield a somewhat lessened esthetic outcome.
To improve this situation, highly esthetic, customizable control surfaces based on glass utilizing capacitive touch technology have been introduced. To create a single gang box device, the approach includes combining a glass surface and a capacitive touch sensor behind the glass with an optional actuating control device mounted within the wall cavity. To provide flexibility to create customized control surfaces, the products may come in different sensor and LED indicator configurations, such as a number of discrete touch points, a single slider, a double slider, a slider combined with a few discrete touch points, etc. For a double gang box or any larger box, the glass surface would be expanded and the sensor circuit board would be increased in size accordingly. However, once this concept is expanded to multi-gang situations, the problem of customization and adaptability becomes more difficult. That is, if there are 25 different single-gang control surfaces available, then a double gang box would contain 625 combinations, a triple gang box 15,625 and a four gang box would contain nearly 400,000 combinations. It would not be practical to create all desired combinations as the warehousing of spare parts creates huge costs and the cost for creating low-volume production runs of a particular flavor would be prohibitively expensive.
A modular system that overcomes these problems and combines the advantages of a Decora-like system with the ability to customize the user-facing surface of a single glass plate is, therefore, desirable.